My first ever attempt at a 3D animation using Blender came out pretty well. I decided I wanted to do a simple still life, and wanted to explore the power of Blender’s recent integration with Yafray. I had tried my hand at a raytracing program for Mac at least a decade ago, and had always been fascinated by this particular juncture between art and technology.
Details of my adventure follow:
My first attempt at mesh modelling an apple, before I discovered Catmull-Clark subsurfs and smoothing, looked pretty bad:
But thanks to innumerable quality tutorials and the Blender 2.3 Guide, I soon got the hang of basic mesh modelling and lighting:
From here, I started exploring the possibilities of lighting effects, looking at nighttime lighting:
And daylight:
Finally settling on a kind of dawn/morning effect:
Next I modelled a lamp:
And played with lamp lights and spotlights as well as material translucency to acheive a more believable effect:
Finally, I added a variety of image maps to the various models in my scene to give them the illusion of realistic texture and color, including this page in the book:
I rendered the animation in three segments totalling about 18 hours of render time on my Powerbook G4 with a 1.25GHz PowerPC processor. Only later did I discover I probably could have acheived a similar effect using the very fast internal Blender rendering engine using environment maps for the mirror effect. Still, the end result is a decent first attempt at a simple fly-through animation.
Technical note: I rendered the second and third phases long after the first phase, and somehow didn’t get the lights just right. So, rather than re-render the first 300 frames I decided to render the last 30 of those frames in that set, then use a “dissolve” effect in iMovie to seamlessly fade into the second half of the animation. Most people probably wouldn’t have noticed the lighting change at frame 301, as it’s fairly subtle, but I wanted to try my hand at a little post-processing, so I added fade-in and fade-out as well.
2 Comments
I was wondering if you have ever made a book that was animated. The pages turned, or if you know of a tutorial out there that tells you how to do it. I would really appreciate it. Thanks
I imagine this would be pretty straightforward using planes for sheets, though it could get complex depending on how much you want the pages to ripple or bend. Smoothing is your friend — but to also get sharp corners, you may have to subdivide carefully. Good luck!